A podcast about how people have applied ideas from outside software to software.

Latest Episodes

Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 3: expertise, panopticism, and the Big Visible Chart

The final episode of "the Foucault trilogy". Ways of evaluating humans that became common during the ~1750-1850 period. Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor. Self-improv...

Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, part 2: the factory

An intermediate episode. It seems wrong to talk about Foucault without mentioning his theory of power and societal change. But I don't think there's a lot you can *do*...

Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, and voluntary panopticism, part 1

Part 1 is a synopsis of Foucault's claim that the societal attitude toward punishment of criminals changed radically over a period of about 80 years, starting in the m...

Interview: Trond Hjorteland on a radical approach to organizational transformation

Open Systems Theory (OST) is an approach to organizational transformation that dates back to the late 1940s. It's been applied a fair amount, but hasn't gotten much mi...

/Governing the Commons/, part 4: creating a successful commons

I describe how the Gal Oya irrigation system got better. It's an example that might inspire hope. I also imagine how a software codebase and its team might have a simi...

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